Column

Nine months in the city and I’m yet to be born to the idea that your city is supposedly — maximum.

Compared to where I come from, this city sucks in many ways. Mumbai, the commercial capital of India, is no patch on the national capital, Delhi, my city.

To my mind, Bombay or Mumbai is crass, and commercial, to the point where it bursts at the seams with trade and profit and money and manna, an older version of Dubai gone to seed. That it’s so brazenly commercial must also explain why it’s so absolutely crass. In my short stay in Bombay I have come to the conclusion that Mumbai is insensitive, the majority in Bombay live in the margins even as a small minority of Bombay live for the huge margins.

What flummoxes is how fast it moves to transform mindsets. The idea of Bombay is “success”. If you are in Bombay you are out to succeed; you are here to pursue a “dream”. You are duty bound to “excel”. Dream, excel, success — three words that define and spell Bombay and the Bombay mindset: Maximum? From the guy on the pavement with his woman and kids in rags, poverty that’s for public display, to the young men and women with dreams in their eyes, who land jobs with multinationals, pay a packet in advance to live in studio apartments equipped with toilets with no elbow space, resulting in that every time you inadvertently move one of your arms and it’s the wall that comes to a halt in a most awkwardly painful manner, painful for the elbow, not the wall.

For all that, there are more failures moving around in Bombay than successes. I can see them in the locals that trundle the length and breadth of the city with a smooth efficiency that would be a marvel to admire if not for the poor maintenance that shows in the interiors. Your locals need some facelift and in that there is no exaggeration, no understatement. I keep reading in newspapers, including in DNA, that gleaming, state-of-the-art coaches are waiting in the wings. Well, it’s time they took wing and ended up on the track, don’t you think? Folks who haven’t travelled on the Delhi Metro should take time out and move to Delhi just to step into a metro.

In Mumbai, I live in a 1BHK on top of a hill, abutting the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, where leopards roam. I have expressed my dislike of this concrete jungle to many a pair of ears.

The best advice I’ve got is “get out if you don’t like it”. Come to think of it, there is no better counsel. The way this city is laid out, both the expressways point the way out even as they show the way into the city of “dreams” and “success”. The reason I haven’t so far taken that fine advice is maybe because I too want to “excel”, and court “success”. Isn’t that maximum?